Final Smartphone Share for 2Q 2010 Unveiled

As promised, here are the final numbers for the smartphone market shares for the second quarter of 2010. As I was on vacation we received the final official numbers from each of the big 4 analyst houses – IDC, Gartner, Strategy Analytics and Canalys who all report smartphone global sales per quarter. I use the average of their reported total number for my total for the market – i.e. 61.7 million is now the ‘official’ number for 2Q that I will use, and is the average of those four. I then use the best available number for 2Q unit sales to determine market shares. To get the best unit count, I use the official numbers from the major manufacturers where they actually report the number, or else the next best sources [usually one of the above] to give the unit count per manufacturer. For the operating system level market shares it then takes some more analysis.

However, I do have to say that I am not happy with these numbers from a mathematical point of view. My numbers "do not add up" properly. My gut says, the average 2Q smartphone sales was actually bigger than what these four major analyst houses reported [the numbers would work out at about 64 million, but even IDC which reported the biggest number of the four, only said the count was 63 million]. But I can’t change the facts just because my gut feels so, I have to wait for others to come up with any revised numbers [if my gut is proven to have been right ha-ha], which means that perhaps in the coming months a few of those "Big Four" will upgrade their numbers, so for the full year we get perhaps a bit bigger number.

Anyway, with that all said, here is the final Q2 market share picture for the big 6 smartphone handset makers and the big 5 operating systems:

SMARTPHONE MAKERS

Nokia, Finland – 24.0 million – 39%

RIM, Canada – 11.2 million – 18%

Apple, USA – 8.4 million – 14%

HTC, Taiwan – 4.5 million – 7%

Samsung, South Korea – 3.0 million – 5%

Motorola, USA – 2.7 million – 4%

Rest of smartphone makers – 7.9 million

TOTAL smartphones in 2Q 2010 is 61.7 million

For those interested, the rest of Top 10 are in order SonyEricsson, Fujitsu, Sharp and LG. The others beyond these have less than 1% each. Nokia is still more than twice as big as its nearest rival and almost as big as RIM, Apple and HTC combined [numbers 2, 3 and 4].

SMARTPHONE OPERATING SYSTEMS

Symbian [Nokia] – 27.0 million – 44%

Android [Google] – 11.4 million – 18%

Blackberry [RIM] – 11.2 million – 18%

iOS/iPhone [Apple] – 8.4 million – 14%

Windows Mobile [Microsoft] – 1.6 million – 3%

Rest of Operating Systems – 2.1 million

TOTAL smartphone OS devices in 2Q 2010 – 61.7 million

For those interested the next biggest are Linux Mobile and Bada. Rest beyond these 7 have far less than 1% of the global smartphone OS market. Big news is Google Android that gained no less than two places, overtaking Blackberry OS and iOS in the process. Symbian is for the first time ever no longer bigger than rivals number 2, 3 and 4 combined. It is still safely far more than twice as big as its nearest rival.

The source for these numbers is Tomi Ahonen Consulting. Feel free to use them for as long as you credit the original source.